Tonight’s exceptionally boring episode of Ancient Aliens, S07E07 “Mysteries of the Sphinx,” takes us back in time—to the 1990s, when the Great Sphinx controversy roared thanks to claims by geologist Robert Schoch that he Egyptian monument was 10,000 to 12,000 years old. The claim found little traction outside of fringe history, largely because mainstream scholars believe Schoch is wrong to attribute the erosion of the Sphinx and its enclosure to water rather than to salt exfoliation. But in the world of the fringe historians, Schoch’s academic credentials provided them all the proof they need to make the monument the world’s oldest monolithic statue.

The show provides an overview of the Sphinx’s recent history and Egyptology’s traditional attribution of the monument to the reign of Khafre, and the stela in front of the Sphinx telling the story of Thutmose IV’s dream of the Sphinx. A reference to the “Eye of the Lord” on the stela is likened to “technology” by William Henry, and David Childress then calls it a “UFO spaceship” identical with the Aten, the sun disk worshiped by Thutmose’s grandson, Akhenaten. The show claims that archaeologists didn’t know there was anything more to the Sphinx than its head prior to 1925, but that isn’t right; historical accounts describe it as having a body long before. Pliny (Natural History 36.17) calls the statue a “monster,” which means that he knew it was more than just a bust, and Al-Maqrizi (Al-Khitat 1.41) notes that the Egyptians said that “the rest of the body is buried in the sand.” Robert Bauval, the author of The Orion Mystery, asserts that a bit of rhetoric on Thutmose’s stela claiming that the Sphinx existed since the dawn of time should be taken as proof that the statue existed in the earliest of days, which Giorgio Tsoukalos says is the time when aliens walked the earth alongside humans, pretending to be gods. This takes us to Robert Schoch’s erosion claims, which were rebutted by geologist August Matthusen many years ago. Schoch originally proposed that the Sphinx was a few thousand years older than conventional chronology proposes, placing it around 5,000 BCE, but now he states that he has extended this timeline back to 10,000 BCE, coincidentally the same time favored by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, John Anthony West, and Atlantis theorists, who chose the date because it coincides with Plato’s dating of Atlantis (c. 9600 BCE), the Egypt of Edgar Cayce (c. 10,490 BCE), and the end of the last Ice Age (c. 10,000 BCE). It is probably not a coincidence that this new date helps Schoch to fit more comfortably into the fringe culture that has built up around the 10,500-9,500 BCE dating. After the first commercial break, the show talks about the loss of the Sphinx’s nose, which popular legend attributes to Napoleon. Kathleen McGowan Coppens gives an embroidered paraphrase of Al-Maqrizi’s history of the Sphinx’s mutilation, which I will instead quote in the original: “In our time, a figure named Sheikh Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr, one of the Sufis of the convent of Dervishes founded by Sa‘id al-Su'ada, set off in 780 (1378-1379 CE) to combat and destroy superstitions. He went to the pyramids and mutilated the face of Abu al-Hul, which has remained in that state down to the present” (Al-Maqrizi, Al-Khitat, 1.41). The various pundits on the show argue that the Sphinx’s head was re-carved by Khafre from an older lion sculpture, paraphrasing arguments made by Graham Hancock, who does not appear here. Next, Robert Temple shows up! The Sirius Mystery author arrives to assert that the Sphinx is really a dog, not a lion, and Anubis. He made this claim in The Sirius Mystery in 1976, but there is no evidence for this claim. The body doesn’t look very doglike to me, particularly since the tail wraps around the statue like a cat. But since that has been heavily reconstructed, we can’t know for sure. David Childress and David Wilcock drop in to contradict the Sirius Mystery by asserting that Anubis was a literal dog-headed alien who flew in to Egypt at the dawn of time. After the next break, we take a look underground at the cenotaph of Osiris, under the causeway leading to the Sphinx. The shaft-tomb was explored in a live TV broadcast in 1999 and is seen again here in new footage. The ancient astronaut theorists find the idea of a cenotaph—a symbolic tomb—ridiculous, so David Wilcock tells us that the sarcophagus is actually a teleportation chamber that allowed aliens to teleport “in and out of our reality.” William Henry dissents slightly in that he prefers to see the pyramids as teleportation chambers. Childress falsely claims that no pharaoh “or Egyptian dynastic mummy” has ever been found in a pyramid. This is a lie Philip Coppens used to tell on the show, and it is just as wrong as when he made the claim in early 2013. As I wrote then:

He appears to be referring to Horus-Sekhem-Khet’s unfinished pyramid, whose burial chamber was found sealed in 1953 and when opened in 1954 proved empty. Coppens discusses this in his Canopus Revelation (2004). Archaeologists believe that when the pyramid was abandoned, the burial chamber was sealed as a decoy and the king buried elsewhere. Somehow this one intact empty burial chamber becomes “many” when Coppens, in his final Ancient Aliens interview, misremembered his own work. In his book Coppens quotes Kurt Mendelsshon as lamenting the “too many empty tomb chambers,” but Mendelsshon was no archaeologist; he was a physicist who argued that the pyramids were symbolic tombs, cenotaphs, not actual tombs. But mummies have been found in pyramids, including that of Queen Seshseshet at Saqqara; and Al-Maqrizi preserved the report of those who first entered the Giza pyramids and claimed that “Bodies buried in the pyramid were, they say, wrapped in cloth frayed by time and that this was made of thread of gold impregnated with compounds that formed a mass of myrrh and aloe to the thickness of a span.” A good description of a mummy, no?

From this, we move on to Robert Bauval’s Orion Correlation Theory, which the show presents as though it were precise and perfect. The fact of the matter is that the three pyramids of Giza do not form a precise model of the constellation of Orion as it appeared in 10,500 BCE. Even Graham Hancock—Robert Bauval’s writing partner—reduced the claim to little more than artistic similarity in a 1999 interview: “I think that what we’re (he and Bauval) proposing, that the ancient Egyptians were making a pleasing symbolic resemblance to what they saw in the sky on the ground is a very reasonable argument.” That claim held sway only until the mainstream media stopped paying attention to Hancock and Bauval, at which point Bauval reverted back to his unsupportable earlier argument. After the next break, we decide to talk about Edgar Cayce as though he were a legitimate source for ancient history rather than a recycler of Theosophical and science fiction texts—texts he even cited by name in his readings (reading 364-1)! Cayce claimed that the pyramids were built in 10,490 BCE (since, as Atlantean constructions they had to predate the destruction of the continent in 9600 BCE), and he related them to Lemuria, Theosophical Root Races, and Atlantis (reading 5748-6)—claims derived from Theosophy and Ignatius Donnelly. This brings us to Cayce’s claim that the Atlantean Hall of Records was located under the right paw of the Sphinx, something that archaeology and geology both failed to confirm.

After the next break, we’re off to Mars to look at images that were shown on Unsealed: Alien Files, where I reviewed them last year and noted that they were nothing more than natural formations captured at a fortuitous angle. This leads to a ridiculous segment in which Childress and others assert that Martians have an underground civilization equal similar to that of Giza. The Martian Sphinx is the real one hiding the Hall of Records, you see; I guess Cayce couldn’t tell the difference between the two—which calls into question all of his predictions, if you think about it too deeply. Jason Martell falsely describes Zecharia Sitchin as a “famous linguist” and then adopts Sitchin’s unsupportable “translation” of Mesopotamian texts as discussing trips between Earth and Mars. But the show is just playing for time here—this is all material they’ve covered many times before. After the final break, the show asks if there is a second sphinx that was buried or lost. This is an old, old idea. Al-Maqrizi wrote in the medieval Al-Khitat that the Arabs believed that a large stone statue in Cairo was the mate of the Sphinx and his equal and opposite. But there is no evidence that Giza had a second Sphinx, and even if it did, it implies nothing about aliens. William Henry thinks that the Sphinx guards specific knowledge about how human beings can “resurrect ourselves […] as star beings” who can ascend to the sky to join “the extraterrestrials” in a glorious eternal communion. Even Robert Bauval thinks that the Sphinx holds the secrets of “our genesis.” It’s a far cry from when Pliny called it a monster and Al-Maqrizi reported that it was meant to be “a talisman against the sand and prevents it from invading the cultivated land of Giza.”

The folklore applied to the Sphinx keeps changing, but one thing remains the same: The legends told of the statue reflect the hopes and fears of those who stare into its eyes, not an essential truth about Egypt or the divine.

Wait, the actually claimed that Akhenaten worshipped something other than the actual Sun?

Because that would be one of the stupidest things they ever said.

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Dave Lewis

11/7/2014 04:03:03 pm

Here's a couple things that may be of interest.

Jimmy Church will be hosting Coast to Coast AM this Sunday night and his first guest will be Scott Wolter.

Over at the Lovecraft Ezine web page Mike Davis mentioned that Stephen King's new novel "Revival", which will be available on November 11, uses some Cthulhu mythos themes. You can read about it here...

Quite interesting, in fact, though probably not for the reasons Wolter would like it to be.

This whole time AU has been running, I've been wondering why he wasn't showing up on Coast to Coast. He hasn't been on the show since two appearances in March and August of 2009. Yet, when he finally does pop up on their radar again it's with Jimmy Church (who's already interviewed him for his own show) as a guest host. Not George Noory.

Given Noory's M.O. of wanting to be connected to every fringe figure and show he can get his brand on, this sort of thing seems more than a little odd. I know he's been running guest hosts ever since John B. Wells's departure, but to have one running his show during a high media profile interview is passing strange indeed.

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Graham

11/7/2014 11:27:21 pm

For a good look at the problems with Bauval's claims about the pyramids you might want to listen to episode 34 of the ExposingPseudoAstronomy podcast:

I see where Mike Bara is complaining (tweeting) that this ep used a ton of his work without attribution. He must mean the so-called sphinx on Mars, which he claims to have been his "find." However, if you read his own account, it's plain that the credit belongs to Guiseppe Pezzella.

He shouldn't complain too loudly lest A+E Networks enforce their trademark on the "Ancient Aliens" name that he's using for his book series.

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EP

11/8/2014 09:36:18 am

I strongly suspect that it's no more enforceable than the "Hooked X" trademark...

Joe Skales

11/8/2014 01:12:14 pm

Now of course a sphinx on Mars in the foreground of eroded pyramids is wildly speculative, as is this entire series. But at least Mr. Colavito didn't post the same misleading comparison picture here as he did in his review of the Red Planet episode where he used a close up shot taken in front of the sphinx to ridicule the idea. I mean... if you wanted a true comparison, you'd have to photograph the sphinx from far away for proper scale. It's actually not very big in comparison to the pyramids (the sphinx is only 66 feet high) and about a half mile away from them. Such persuasion was worthy of Ancient Aliens...

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Only Me

11/8/2014 01:28:39 pm

Have you done an internet search for Sphinx photos? Most of them are profile shots or frontal views. There doesn't seem to be a photo of the Sphinx taken at enough distance to make it comparable to the one on Mars. I did find this photo comparison, though:

http://alienufonews.com/pyramids-on-mars/

Comparing the Martian "Sphinx" to the one at Giza, I have to say it's not really compelling.

EP

11/8/2014 01:38:06 pm

Try Google Earth :)

Joe Skales

11/9/2014 02:18:40 am

Only Me, that's no excuse for Mr. Colavito to profer something just as misleading as the Ancient Aliens cohorts do to bolster his criticism of same. There are plenty of legitimate ways to poke holes at their speculation without having to stoop to their level.

Only Me

11/9/2014 03:53:11 am

I don't see how Jason mislead anyone. He used a readily available photo of the Sphinx--a monument everyone should already be familiar with--and compared it to the only photo of its Martian "twin" that I've seen thus far. Besides, if a photo of the Sphinx were taken in the exact way its "twin" is depicted, do you honestly think it would make a difference? A weirdly formed rock, set against the backdrop of actual mountains, isn't the same as what you see at Giza.

As to "There are plenty of legitimate ways to poke holes at their speculation without having to stoop to their level", that was the purpose of his episode review.

Mr. Colavito basically presents the Mars photo and questions the comparison by then showing a sphinx photo from an angle and distance that distorts the scale. So no meaningful comparison could be made. Again, I'm not embracing the methodology of Ancient Aliens. But if you're going to point out the distortions made by said television show, it's best not to commit them yourself. I found it refreshing that Mr. Colavito didn't reprint his old comparison for the review of this episode, though the same speculation was contained in its subject matter. Perhaps he thought better of it.

EP

11/9/2014 12:36:13 pm

Joe Skales, last time you were here you accused Jason of being an obsessive and harped on about Jason's lack of advanced academic credentials.

The content of your comments makes both of these accusations rather ironic.

Only Me

11/9/2014 01:15:51 pm

So the basis of your complaint--Jason mislead his readership and committed an AA-worthy "distortion"--is due to the fact there are NO photos of the Sphinx that have been taken at the proper perspective, allowing for comparative scale been it and the alleged Martian "Sphinx"? That's the problem?

Side-view mirrors must be the bane of your existence, since OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

Only Me

11/9/2014 01:19:58 pm

"been it" should have been "between it". Computer's acting weird.

EP

11/9/2014 01:20:31 pm

Joe Skales, are you ridiculously good looking?

https://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9qtvkIXlk1r6ozp9o1_500.gif

Joe Skales

11/10/2014 02:57:12 am

Wow Only Me. First you pretend my point isn't valid by denying the existence of other sphinx photos from your limited internet search in excusing Mr. Colavito's obvious out of scale comparison. Then you resort to personal attacks via ad hominem and assuming dark motive in mischaracterizing and oversimplifying a past post of mine. Congratulations. You now have achieved the sort of discourse below even Ancient Alien standards and will now be ignored accordingly.

Joe Skales

11/10/2014 03:02:11 am

Correction Only Me. That would be EP with the mischaracterization and assumption of motive, as well as the old fallacy of appeal to ridicule (which you both embrace). Now on to ignoring both of you...

Clint Knapp

11/10/2014 04:34:28 am

Perhaps now would be a good time to mention that the angle and distance of a photo has absolutely nothing to do with scale. The measurements of the pyramids and the sphinx, as well as the distance between them, are all matters of public record. Photographic analysis based on those measurements is entirely possible regardless where the picture is taken from. In fact, in light of the knowledge that such measurements are public record, the only question such analysis would be necessary to determine is the location the photo was taken from. Your argument, therefore, is the misleading one.

EP

11/10/2014 04:34:29 am

Gunn, is that you? :)

Only Me

11/10/2014 05:40:56 am

I have a question, Joe. How do you know how limited or extensive my search was? The correct answer, Joe, is you don't. At no time have I denied the existence of any photos of the Sphinx, thereby invalidating your "argument". So, that's mischaracterization and a false accusation.

"Congratulations. You now have achieved the sort of discourse below even Ancient Alien standards."

Your "argument" was rendered invalid from the start, because you don't comprehend, as Sesame Street used to say, "one of these things is not like the other."

Joe Skales

11/11/2014 02:50:20 am

Clint, are you kidding me? The angle and distance from where a photograph is taken can be used to distort scale, as I believe Mr. Colavito did with his comparison as referenced. Of course the distances are no secret and I even gave the size of the sphinx and distance from the pyramids from the get go. Knowing these distances, the Mars shot isn't too far off in comparison; at least as compared to the evidentiary photo proffered by Mr. Colavito to bolster his disdain. Please note, from the very beginning I've maintained that the whole idea promoted by Ancient Aliens is speculative, and wildly so. But using ad hominem, appeals to ridicule and skewed photographs to make your points is hardly intelligent discourse. I mean Clint, your own argument in this regard is the sort of equivocation equivalent to "I'm rubber, you're glue..."

That's still not quite to scale Mr. Colavito, but not as misleading as what you posted with the Red Planet review. Please note, I'm not accepting what Ancient Aliens is putting forth. There is a giant mound on Mars and a rock structure that they believe could be remnants of a sphinx. For the third time, wildly speculative in my view. However, even your recent photo linked to above makes the sphinx look rather large in comparison to the pyramids, but in actuality, it's relatively small. Those who have been there know this. Not Mars, mind you. Giza.

You must admit, the photo you chose for your Red Planet review wasn't the best for comparative purposes.

Shane Sullivan

11/8/2014 12:17:18 pm

"The Martian Sphinx is the real one hiding the Hall of Records, you see; I guess Cayce couldn’t tell the difference between the two—which calls into question all of his predictions, if you think about it too deeply."

It's a little known fact that the Atlantis to which Edgar Cayce was referring was actually on the planet Yuggoth. Interestingly enough, it DID rise in 1968.

"William Henry thinks that the Sphinx guards specific knowledge about how human beings can “resurrect ourselves […] as star beings” who can ascend to the sky to join “the extraterrestrials” in a glorious eternal communion."

Well, of course, ancient people were obsessed with the sky because that's where aliens came from. And the terrestrial gods...they were aliens too. And the chthonic gods, mountain gods, underwater gods, tree gods...all aliens. Because how could a hearth god NOT be an alien?

Kinda makes you wonder why they even bother giving token lip service to sky gods anymore, since they're gonna call every god an alien anyway.

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Clint Knapp

11/8/2014 12:40:04 pm

Or, as is the case of Enki, they'll call an underwater god a sky god to force him into the alien agenda!

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Shane Sullivan

11/8/2014 12:54:48 pm

People only think Enki was an underwater god because they don't have the sheer knowledge of the famous linguist "Zachariah [sic] Sitchin".

Only Me

11/8/2014 12:44:25 pm

And remember, all sky gods/aliens are infatuated with mountains, islands and caves!

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EP

11/8/2014 01:15:25 pm

Aliens are basically Boy Scouts!

Kal

11/9/2014 07:12:16 am

The Sphinx. I looked into this. It is not a jackal. Neat idea, but no. It is a lion. The mane has fallen off. The nose might have come off some time before Napoleon, probably after Kafre though.

Egyptian lore does not go back to the ice age, as in the movie 10,000 BC. A proto group could have lived there, but there is no direct evidence.

Erosion can come from sand as well as water.

The alleged other Sphinx is gone, long gone. Many pyramids in Giza were dismantled later on, some in Roman times, to build in Cairo right next to the pyramids..

The face on MAsrs, slash Pyramids on Mars, are nothing more than rocks. Also amusing is that these supposedly distant pyramids and buried other sphinx are small. The Pathfinder was the size of a tabletop. A model of it is in a museum in Oregon. Like the Yogi rock and the Figure rock from other probes, these things are just a few feet to a mile off, and small. The Martians must have been little people. Those hilltops are hills, very small hills in the near distance. The 1997 technology used to scan them was scanning them from only a meter or 3 feet high, out to a few miles. Thus they're a mile off. They are also no larger than a football field from that angle and distance. Tiny Martians. Maybe next they'll be looking for pygmy Gray aliens.

Go little people. Go giants.

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JM Williams

4/1/2016 03:53:04 am

The Sphinx is clearly a pharaoh's head on a lion's body. The head is wearing the royal headscarf of the pharaoh and one can even see where the false beard would have been attached. Speaking of the beard, a piece of it is in the British Museum.

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About Me

I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.